events

Online controlled experimentation (OCE), also called A/B testing, is an often used tool in industry to determine if deploying changes into production is the right decision to make. Running experiments has shown an immense impact to the revenue of companies in industry, however this type of experimentation comes with a lot of pitfalls, some which can invalidate the entire experiment. As more organizations start relying on online experimentation, relying only on experts in OCE’s becomes infeasible and creating guidance on the platform where the experiments take becomes a mandatory item.

Dear all, We’re starting up the reading club again :) Next Wednesday we’ll be talking about empirical software engineering and building theories 🧑‍🏫🧑‍💻 Join us on September the 11th, 13:00 - 14:00 on Zoom to discuss: “Buildng Theories in Software Engineering” by Easterbrook et al. (Chapter 12 in this pdf: https://www.cin.ufpe.br/~fmcf2/Doutorado/2008-Guide%20to%20Advanced%20Empirical%20Software%20Engineering.pdf#page=317) Wanna join & you are not part of our Mattermost? Send an email to c.e.brandt /at/ tudelft.nl to get the Zoom link 😊

Many approaches for testing configurable software systems start from the same assumption: it is impossible to test all configurations. This motivated the definition of variability-aware abstractions and sampling techniques to cope with large configuration spaces. Yet, there is no theoretical barrier that prevents the exhaustive testing of all configurations by enumerating them if the effort required to do so remains acceptable. In this talk, I will introduce the different elements currently used to abstract and reason about software variability, and the most common sampling techniques applied to select representative configurations for testing.

Summary Code review is a widely used technique to support software quality. It is a manual activity, often subject to repetitive and tedious tasks that increase the mental load of reviewers and compromise their effectiveness. The developer-centered nature of code review can represent a bottleneck that does not scale in large systems with the consequence of com- promising firms’ profits. This challenge has led to an entire line of research on code review improvement.

Code duplication is a form of technical debt frequently observed in software systems. Its existence negatively affects the maintainability of a system in numerous ways. In order to tackle the issues that come with it, various automated clone detection techniques have been proposed throughout the years. However, the vast majority of them operate using the entire codebase as input, resulting in redundant calculations and undesirable delays when this process is repeated for every new revision of a project.

As organizations start to adopt machine learning in critical business scenarios, the development processes change and the reliability of the applications becomes more important. To investigate these changes and improve the reliability of those applications, we conducted two studies in this thesis. The first study aims to understand the evolution of the processes by which machine learning applications are developed and how state-of-the-art lifecycle models fit the current needs of the fintech industry.

Systematic literature reviews in software engineering as well as other disciplines, serve as the foundation for sound scientific research. The aim for these literature reviews is to aggregate all existing knowledge on a research problem and produce informed guidelines for practitioners. This enables practitioners to apply appropriate software engineering solutions in a specific contexts. However, one major problem exists regarding systematic literature reviews, the overall execution duration may take up as much as 24 months.

The recommendation of tasks for newcomers within a software project through good first issues is being done within the domain of software development, such as on Github platform. These issues aim to help newcomers identify tasks that are suitable for them and their level of expertise within the project. This thesis report investigates the effectiveness regarding developer onboarding and task completion of good first issues by data mining a set of 105 repositories and manually analyzing at most 30 good first issues and 30 initial commits per sampled project.

Personality plays a significant role in our lives; it does not only influence what we think, feel, and do, but also affects what we say about what we think, feel, and do. In software engineering (SE), it might help in improving team composition through a combination of personalities within a team, and it could help explain work preferences and work satisfaction. Earlier studies in the field of software engineering have focused on extracting personality from developers with the use of questionnaires and automatic tools such as psycholinguistic tests.

Join the next SERG Reading Club 📖📚! Next week Thursday, June the 25th, 14:00 - 15:00 we come together on Zoom to discuss: “Selecting Empirical Methods for Software Engineering Research” by Easterbrook et al. (Chapter 11 in this pdf: https://www.cin.ufpe.br/~fmcf2/Doutorado/2008-Guide%20to%20Advanced%20Empirical%20Software%20Engineering.pdf#page=343) Wanna join & you are not part of our Mattermost? Send an email to c.e.brandt /at/ tudelft.nl to get the Zoom link 😊